Sunday, September 4, 2016

Donald Trump is Poised to Lose in the Biggest Landslide in Modern American History

The conventional wisdom has calcified: Donald Trump is going to lose to Hillary Clinton.

Sure, there have been brief moments when the outcome seemed in doubt — when the FBI director called Clinton's handling of her emails while secretary of state "extremely careless"; when it looked for about a half-hour that Trump received a significant bump from the GOP convention. But for the most part, and especially in the month since the conclusion of the Democratic convention, the race has settled into a stable pattern, with Clinton running between 4 and 8 points ahead of Trump nationally and beating him in most, if not all, of the so-called swing states. Hence the conventional wisdom: Trump will lose.

But the conventional wisdom is wrong. Trump isn't merely going to lose. He's going to lose in the biggest popular vote landslide in modern presidential history.

Democrat George McGovern finished with 37.5 percent in his 1972 race against Richard Nixon, the lowest tally for a major party nominee in a two-person race since Republican Alf Landon pulled in 36.5 percent against FDR in 1936. (George H.W. Bush managed to win 37.4 percent in his 1992 contest against Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, with the latter coming in at 18.9 percent of the vote.) Trump is now on track to challenge all of these results. It's not crazy to think he'll finish with less than 35 percent of the popular vote.

The electoral map will be different. Trump will lose there, too — though unlike McGovern, who pulled in only 17 electoral votes, Trump is pretty much guaranteed a triple-digit tally of electoral votes thanks to overwhelming Republican dominance of states in the South, Midwest, and Intermountain West. The GOP could nominate a turnip and still win the South.

But the popular vote will tell the democratic truth: Trump may well end up being the most unpopular candidate from a major party since before the New Deal.